Kimi K2.5 vs Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Moonshot AI

Kimi K2.5, released by Moonshot AI in January 2026, is an updated Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion active parameters. It builds on Kimi K2 with improved coding performance across multiple languages and an expanded context window. Kimi K2.5 targets agentic development workflows, polyglot code generation, and open-source deployments requiring large-scale MoE reasoning.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a 397-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model from Alibaba's Qwen team, released in February 2026 as the open-weight flagship of the Qwen3.5 series, featuring 17 billion active parameters per forward pass through a hybrid linear-attention and sparse-MoE architecture based on Gated Delta Networks. The model was co-trained on text, images, and video using early fusion, making it natively multimodal across a 262K token context window, while achieving significantly higher inference throughput than comparable dense models due to its sparse computation design. At release it was one of the most capable open-weight models publicly available, offered under Apache 2.0 and accessible through Alibaba's DashScope API as the Qwen3.5-Plus endpoint.